The Civil Sphere

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/17450101.2021.1872871

Pandemic (Im)mobilities

This article analyzes Taiwan’s National Epidemic Prevention Team, a collective synergy between government and society in fighting COVID-19. We draw on a model of collaborative governance to dissect...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/01925121211012291

A whole-of-nation approach to COVID-19: Taiwan’s National Epidemic Prevention Team

This paper provides a quantitative examination of the link between political institutions and deaths during the first 100 days of the COVID-19 pandemic. We demonstrate that countries with more democratic political institutions experienced deaths on a larger per capita scale and sooner than less democratic countries. The result is robust to the inclusion of many relevant controls, a battery of estimation techniques, and to estimation with instruments for the institutional measures that we consider. Additionally, we examine the extent to which COVID-19 deaths were impacted heterogeneously by policy responses across types of political institutions. Policy responses in democracies were less effective in reducing deaths in the early stages of the crisis. The results imply that democratic political institutions may have a disadvantage in responding quickly to pandemics.

/pdf/political-regimes-and-deaths-in-the-early-stages-of-the-2xx4suyloz.pdf

Political Regimes and Deaths in the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic

In the global fight against COVID-19, a “pandemic memory thesis” emerges. This thesis argues that nations with memories of past pandemics, such as East Asian countries with SARS memories, can bette...

Making memory work: The SARS memory and China’s war on COVID-19

Adopting a Civil Sphere Theory framework, we argue that Taiwan's efforts at containing COVID-19 resulted from its "societalization" of pandemic unpreparedness, which was triggered by the 2003 SARS outbreak and resumed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Societalization refers to the process through which institutional failures are transformed into societal crises, with the civil sphere mobilized to discuss institutional dysfunctions, push for reforms, and attempt to democratize or otherwise transform institutional cultures. The societalization of pandemic unpreparedness in Taiwan led to reforms of the public health administration and the medical profession, thereby establishing state mechanisms for encouraging early responses and coordinating centralized command during outbreaks, and healthcare infrastructures for coordinating patient transfer and ensuring supplies of personal protective equipment. Reflections upon past uncivil acts among citizens motivated the civil sphere to foster a discourse of interdependence, redefining the boundaries between individual choices and civic virtues. Meanwhile, unaddressed challenges remained, including threats related to Taiwan's political polarization. Our paper challenges the thesis of "authoritarian advantage," highlighting how democratic societies can foster social preparedness to respond to crises. By illustrating how societalization can reach temporary closures but become reactivated subsequently, our study extends the theory of societalization by explicating its historical dimension.

/pdf/the-societalization-of-pandemic-unpreparedness-lessons-from-5cxp8gbc2p.pdf

Hsin-Yi Hsieh

Papers

The "Societalization" of pandemic unpreparedness: lessons from Taiwan's COVID response.